will stopping an animation render mid-way still save the progress?
Answer: no.
We generally make our animation renders as a PNG or EXR image sequence, and then we transform the image sequence in the final .mp4 (this latter render is very fast).
The advantages are that you can stop the render in midway, if there's a crash or an electric failure you don't loose the previous computing, you store maximum uncompressed quality, you can store layers for later compositing, and so on.